The Death of Che Guevara (36 page)

It had no protective powers. They were tortured and then killed by the police.

“You’re mocking me, I know,” Nico said sadly, for it was a great sorrow to him that we could not feel the power of his beloved, the warmth. “But you’re wrong, Ernesto. It’s easy to mock. We’re a generation of mockers.” He turned accusingly towards the archvillain, Chaco, as if the source of derision were always in him. Chaco looked away from the accusation, humming to himself contentedly. He was, I knew, composing a song, another piece of his “cycle” on Fidel, little verses with titles like “Fidel Is a Mansion,” or “Fidel Is a Soap,” which he sang at inopportune times to torment Nico.

“But Fidel
would
know. I tell you Guevara—listen to me!—he is the most extraordinary man. Not only on the little island of Cuba. But in all the Americas. It’s simply an accident that he was born there and not some bigger place! The rest of the democratic Left on this continent, they talk. They talk. Then they rest and talk some more. But Castro
acts
. History will show. He has
guidance
. He will liberate Cuba from that spider Batista. I know. I am certain. Absolutely certain.”

Chaco smiled at me. Nico, Chaco said one night at Hilda’s, frightened him, with this hagiography of a murderer. Who knew what it might incite him to do! “Nico frightens me, Hilda. But not so much as Ernesto, of course.” He spoke his accusation directly to Hilda, who sat and looked at him quizzically. Who might ever know if he were serious? What
use
was such irony? “In the long run, in my opinion, Hilda, this Guevara will do more damage.” But such mockery of me was rare now from Chaco. Our acquaintance had changed these last few weeks in Guatemala, as the city grew nervous and despaired, and had become a friendship. At night on the golf course he talked with me about Gandhi. And when I spoke he listened, with his face strangely calm (or so I thought watching him by moonlight). The absence of movement signaled a serious concentration for Chaco, the way Fernando’s contortions had mimed the passage of his thought. Perhaps Gandhi might bring him singleness. As for Chaco’s irony, Nico was now its preferred object. We stood and watched the palace. The men finished with the machine-gun emplacements and left the roof-balcony. Would they return, I wondered? I rolled up the sleeves of my sweaty shirt. It was hot here even in the late afternoon. I had slept in my clothes for days. My white cotton shirt had a sea-smell to it, and a moist feel.

“And you would be certain if you met him. You would see the light that is in his face, Ernesto. You would know then as I know. He is a fire in the field!
Nothing can stop him! All is consumed! He would take action against these mercenaries. He would leap at them. He says only an action will move the people, show them that a fight is possible!”

My words! I realized suddenly. His words. The longing of a generation. You’d like him, Soto had said; you share a certain viewpoint with him. Impossible! I could share
nothing
with such a man! He was a charlatan, a fraud, a killer, a gangster. (Was that my own voice, I wondered. Or that of a sad, stern, isolated moralist? I will not become you, Father. “Go away old man!”)

“No,” Nico said. He clapped his hands together, an engine revving up. “He is your age Ernesto. Or maybe a few years older. You would like him. He is manly. He wouldn’t let the Guatemalan Revolution die without a struggle. That lacks courage! He would keep the idea of resistance alive for the future, even if we were to fail now.” His hands thudded their approval.

But what action could Fidel or anyone take? Defeat was thick in the air of Guatemala City, like humidity before rain. The bad air was everywhere. The military would not allow Arbenz to arm the workers and peasants, so the Revolution’s life depended on the loyalty of the Army, its only defenders. And the generals, Arbenz assured the nation, would remain loyal to him. The officers were his friends, his former students at the military academy. He had taught them how to read, a word at a time, each word a test of their worthiness. Poor Arbenz! The Party supported Arbenz’s decision. The people must not struggle.

A North American aircraft carrier had anchored off shore near Puerto Barrios. The time for revolution was … not yet.

But Fidel, ah, Fidel would take action! Fidel would know what to do!

Fidel began each of Nico’s thoughts. Fidel instructed him by word and example. Fidel accused him. Fidel had nearly gotten him killed. He had betrayed Fidel by surviving. He hadn’t been courageous enough for Fidel. Fidel took risks. Fidel
acted
. Fidel spoke beautifully. Listen please, Ernesto, to this magnificent speech of Fidel’s! Fidel knows what to do. History guides him.

Why haven’t we heard from him? Why hasn’t he spoken? This story fills his silence; entertainment between the acts. I continue telling the story of my past until Fidel speaks
.

“You say the word ‘history,’ Nico,” I said. “History guides him. But I hear the word ‘God.’ God guides Fidel.”

Nico, furious at the mention of that Unfortunate Personage, spat an inch
or two from my mismatched shoes. I pushed at the saliva with the flat end of my boot.

Fidel, he said angrily,
would
know what to do, by looking inside (as if that escaped theology). He was an instrument of history. Fidel wouldn’t sit still (as if movement were a kind of election). (
He wouldn’t sit here at this table, waiting for the end.
) He wouldn’t sit still.

Nor could Nico. His motions were constant; abrupt; halted halfway; forceful-looking, but without purpose. He seemed angry always, a man on the point of striking someone. But he only struck himself. He beat his large fist against his leg, the side of his jaw; he pounded the heels of his hand together in a rapid motion that was frightening to watch, like a destructive machine, or a seizure. (How would Pavlov have explained that? I asked Hilda one evening, as if I were presenting Nico’s case, as if he weren’t there. And, as he sat on the couch banging his hands, he wasn’t; he was lost in his painful ecstasy.)

Now he ran his palm through his long black hair, carefully straightened by him and formed into a high pompadour. He would not cut his hair, he vowed, until Fidel was released from Batista’s jail on the Isle of Pines.

The feel of his hair reminded him, as most objects did, this grieving lover, of his heart’s only subject. “And even in prison he struggles. He sends letters to guide our movement. Every day of his life Fidel fights. He needs struggle as you”—Nico turned towards me, the possible acolyte—“as you need knowledge.”

What more knowledge did I need now? I wondered. What might return this world to me? What might help me move my sodden limbs one more step? What might help me breathe this bad air?

We walked away from the palace. My leg muscles hurt, cramped from last night’s accommodations, the golf-course fairway. With every step my body complained from a thousand small places. I felt like a crumpled piece of paper.

Nico’s wide white shirt reminded me of the smocks worn in grade school. We’d been gauchos—our heads shaved for lice—and had ecstatic knife fights. We made daggers from sticks, their ends burned black. A hit left a charcoal mark on your smock, where delicious blood would have poured from your torn skin. I risked my eyes running at them. I was fearless in my savage maneuvers. I had to make a distance between us, hold them off by the actions I might improvise that they were afraid to perform.

We headed towards the park, a little way down the avenue. I saw them then. The boy with the round lightly freckled face came first, a tormentor bribed with pieces of linted candy. Ernesto Banana, Banana Guevara, Banana Guevara, Banana Banana. They must not mock my father’s name! (
You have
his name
, she had written me.
You are what was best in him
. It felt like a curse.) They pulled me towards an iron basin, my tormentors, still with me, with me always, aroused to walk again by this shirt of Nico’s, by my father’s death, more vivid to me than my companions in the empty streets of Guatemala City. Why hadn’t he protected me against them? Their legs surrounded me, trapped me. An animal, I writhed on the ground, straining for breath.

But he had protected me! He had taken the sickly boy, and with his magic regimen made him strong. Shazam, he said, tying the plaid scarf about my throat. He ran me through the streets until I could run no farther, until I had done my utmost. Together we charted my progress on the wall of my bedroom. The potter’s clay figure brought to life by his love and longing. I became captain of the rugby team.

Only to be beaten down again. He walked along the sideline in the rain in that silly hat, watching them torment me. Why hadn’t he stopped the game?

How childish, he said, to cry for your father’s protection! At your age! “You’re weak,” he said, “your generation is weak.”

Nico stopped in the middle of the street and looked at me, his face suddenly slack. He bowed his head, for he expected reproof. “Yes,” he said, “we are weak. Most of us.”
But not Fidel!
When he was fourteen Fidel had organized a strike of the sugar workers, a strike against his own father! And when he was eighteen he had walked all over the plantation, calling a public meeting, to denounce the old man.” ‘You abuse the powers you wrench from people with deceitful promises!’ ” These were Fidel’s own words; Nico could be sure that it was correct to speak them. So he shouted them. But there was no one else in the street to hear.

And Nico quoting Fidel was, Chaco said, the wind in the reeds, the sea in the background. Not unpleasant, and hardly meaningful. Like his pounding hands, another mechanical discharge of affect.

We had now heard bits of Fidel’s speeches from every epoch—for Nico knew by heart pages of this wordy man’s remarks. What heat, we wondered, did Nico find in this fat rhetoric? It was difficult for us to imagine warming ourselves there. This, Chaco and I agreed, was not literature, was not the sublime poetry of a true, an inspired leader. It was rant. How could someone be so moved by it? Chaco poked me lightly in my ribs, to share the joke.

But I was elsewhere. My father, I thought, had never deceived—not anyone but himself.
He
might more likely call a meeting to denounce me. Chalk letters on the big brown doors to the dining room.
This is what Ernesto Guevara said to his mother
.… A moral man, moving away from us into a
perfect implacable justice, a quiet that was a continual accusation, the unanswerable accusation of defeat, for the failure of a man truly too good for this world condemned the world. And I, the one person this mistrustful isolated man had allowed himself to rely on, I had abandoned him.

Dearest Tete: Your father died yesterday on the floor of the living room. It was a peaceful end. Please, I beg you do not come home for the burial. By the time you receive this he will already be in the ground. And I am quite capable of taking care of myself. So don’t insult me by returning! You have his name. You are what was best in him.
You
are Ernesto now. You have a book to write, a world to conquer for all of us
.

Love, my darling Ernesto, from your mother,
Celia
                             

“You see,” the wind went on, moving through trees, over buildings, “nothing is more important to Fidel than truth. Nothing. Not his family. Not his career. Not his life. Nothing. Truth is his food. Without it Fidel would die. He wants nothing for himself but justice!” He was shouting again, and smashing his right fist into his thigh.

These charismatics, my mother said, always they want nothing for themselves! Nothing but absolute power over you! She was right, clearly right, sadly, unappealably right. Nico moved far away from me, behind the thick air, the air like glass. These voices! They sealed me off from the world, with their mockery, or their stern moralism.

Chaco placed an arm about Nico, to calm him. “Here,” he said kindly, “have a cigarette.” He offered him a red-and-white package he’d acquired at a cafe we’d stopped at that morning, before guard duty. Chaco made a game out of getting those packages, an amateur sport, for he himself didn’t smoke. He sought out the North American “professors” without universities, the “journalists” who had no newspapers to write for. They flirted with each other. Chaco would smile, wink, encourage an agent to invite him over to his table, engage him in conversation. They asked questions about the city’s morale (very bad), the army’s loyalty (very questionable), the students’ feelings (very strong implacable opposition to a certain country to the north. Know where?). Chaco spewed nonsense. “The Guatemalan people have chewed the food of nationhood.” He nodded his head up and down earnestly, looking over at our table, where Nico grew taut with fury, and I, against my will, smiled fondly. “How can they spit it out?” For this little stew Chaco had garbled up bits of my
thoughts and Nico’s “Fidel Theology.” “Do you know the taste of nationhood, sir, of real independence?” He flicked his large earlobe back and forth. His voice squeaked rhythmically, as if this were one of his songs. “It is bitter, but pungent, odoriferous, more vivifying than greed.” He showed the agent the palm of his hand, as if delivering a benediction. The palm was puckered with lines, like my mother’s, as if he, too, had put his hand over a fire. (I wondered how it had happened. I meant to ask him about it.) “The fruit of a tree,” he said. Strange benediction; he began to waggle his fingers. “The fruit of
the
tree.” The agent looked about, the businessman caught with a chorus girl. Bad for his career. He quickly slid a package of North American cigarettes across the table, the expected gratuity in these encounters. He didn’t want to touch the madman’s lined hand, those long thin fingers waving like worms.

Chaco wasn’t the only one engaged in the cigarette enterprise. At meetings in the university, endless meetings, crowded, hot, meetings without plan, without hope, a long complaint, a shared anxiety without issue, I would see those packages here and there in the assembly, recognize them over my head on the balcony that ran the length of the room, held up for a moment, disappearing into pockets. Offerings of smoke rose to the gold angels on the high domed ceiling. It was hard for me to breathe. The red spots of a disease, I thought. Will the patient live? No one thought so anymore. The cafe was nearly empty this morning, the chairs still tipped over on top of the white metal tables. And the few students there spoke quietly of certain defeat. The Guatemalan Revolution was the grounds in their coffee.